Monday, May 12, 2008
Rachel Louise Snyder reports on grueling recovery efforts in this storm-battered Central American country -- and on the persistence of dreams among the people.
Jan 26, 1999 | What you notice first is the smell. A sour, rotting stench, it seeps into your hair, your clothes, your skin. It's in my watchband now. When I first arrived in this section of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, called Comayaguela, just before the New Year, workers from UNICEF issued me and Ann, the photographer accompanying me, cotton face masks to avoid the smell. But it seeped into the cotton. We smell it at night when we go back to our hotel. In our hair and in our sheets. In our backpacks and in the thin pages of my notebook. Mostly, though, it seeps into your memory.
Nearly 25 years ago, another powerful hurricane devastated Honduras. Fifi, it was called, like an innocent pup, and 8,000 people died. Three hundred thousand were left homeless. This one, Mitch, was worse: 6,600 died, 9,000 are missing, 1.5 million are homeless. When it came, on Oct. 26 and 27, it brought 200-mph winds before diminishing to a catastrophic tropical storm that hovered for nearly a week.
You can't walk more than 10 minutes without seeing the effects in Tegucigalpa, the capital. Garbage still hangs from the telephone and electrical wires. Buildings are shells of concrete or wood, piled inside with dried solid mud. Water marks on some houses rise higher than six feet. Roads have been slashed in half by foot-thick cement walls that slid down the mountainsides; the slashes reveal gutted layers like raw wounds with red dirt underneath. Once, while walking through a neighborhood with only seven walls left standing from the dozens of homes that had been there, I looked down underneath the swell of dirt I was standing on and saw, peeking through, the rusted yellow of a car roof. The rest was buried.
We have come here, Ann and I, to report on the post-hurricane relief efforts. This is our second journey to Honduras -- the first was in 1994, when we drove overland through Copan, San Pedro Sula and on up to Tela. Portions of those roads now no longer exist.
There was a misty sadness around New Year's in Comayaguela. There were few firecrackers this year, fewer fiestas, fewer gifts. But there were prayers of gratitude, too, for those spared. Last night, from the windows of our hotel in the central market, we watched a procession of hundreds holding candles and following a row of priests in white robes and red sashes. "Help in our hour of need," I heard the priest say. Many brushed tears from their cheeks.
The market here runs almost as it did before the hurricane. Stalls sell grains, fruit, shoes, undergarments, tools, colorful toys, small electronics, baseball hats, barrettes, firecrackers, powdered milk, meat and household goods. A small boom box is rigged to two bullhorns and merengue music blares and crackles. Overhead, U.S. military Chinooks carry relief supplies to remote parts of the country. Behind the vendors, where a railing used to run along a bridge overlooking the Rio Choluteca, a few wooden planks have been nailed together for safety.
Even before the hurricane, Honduras was the poorest country in Central America. Now, more than 50 percent of its crops have been destroyed. In the valleys around San Pedro Sula, the banana crops for this year and next have been wiped out. Some are afraid that all the grains coming in from relief agencies will send the shattered economy into a depression. Surplus will cause the prices to drop and poor farmers won't earn enough to live. It's a terrific irony, a law of economics that seems cruelly unjust.
What have been avoided are the disease epidemics that often follow such natural disasters. Even in the shelters where so many are living together in squalor, diarrhea has been the most common ailment. Cholera, typhoid, malaria -- they are no more prolific than during any other year. Relief agencies acted quickly. Enormous blue tanks with UNICEF stamped on the side brought clean water to shelters and rural communities.
Get Salon in your mailbox!